The Hidden, Wildly NSFW Scandal of the Hugo Nominations

Hugo Awards

On Tuesday, nominees for speculative fiction’s highest honor, the Hugo Awards, were announced—and while the shortlist has stoked some controversy recently, this year passed almost entirely without incident. The Best Novel category featured widely praised works by Ada Palmer, Cixin Lu, even WIRED contributors N. K. Jemisin and Charlie Jane Anders. But lower down, nearly escaping notice in Best Novelette, was a name few people had ever seen before: Stix Hiscock.

Three things immediately stuck out about this. One is the obvious nom de schwing, which reads like a rejected prank-call name for Moe to call out on The Simpsons. Another is that Best Novelette has lately emerged as a microcosm of the Hugos’ move toward gender and racial inclusion. Women have won the category four of the last five years, and all of this year’s nominees are women—except for Hiscock. And perhaps most interestingly, five of these current novelettes appeared in genre publications like Clarkesworld or on Tor.com. The sixth was self-published: Hiscock’s Alien Stripper Boned from Behind by the T-Rex. If that title sounds a little strange, it should—there’s some history to it. Someone has tried this move before.

Well, not someone—many someones. Hiscock’s nomination is the work of the Rabid Puppies, a community of reactionary sci-fi/fantasy writers and fans who in 2015 sought to derail the Hugos’ big-tent evolution by stuffing the notoriously gameable ballot box with what they saw as criminally overlooked white male nominees. After the Rabid Puppies found huge success—they placed more than 50 recommendations—predecessors the Sad Puppies smuggled in a 2016 Best Short Story nominee they hoped would really tank the proceedings: Space Raptor Butt Invasion, an erotic gay sci-fi tale self-published by an unknown named Chuck Tingle.

Incredibly, though, the plan backfired. Tingle turned out to be a ridiculously lovable, possibly insane ally—or at least a very shrewd performance artist—who used his new platform to speak out against exclusion and bigotry in all their forms. In the intervening year-plus, he’s emerged as something of a cult icon, pumping out ebook after skewering ebook of wildly NSFW prose. His latest, Pounded In The Butt By My Second Hugo Award Nomination, refers to the recognition he got this year, on his own, in the Best Fan Writer category.

And that, basically, is how we end up with Stix Hiscock. In March, Vox Day, a sci-fi writer and the pack leader of the Rabid Puppies, called on his minions to vote Hiscock in. The reasoning couldn’t be more obvious: If at first you don’t succeed, find a new Tingle; a Tingle 2.0; an evil hetero twin. A Twingle, if you will. When reached for comment, Day replied: “No thanks. You’ll have to sustain your Narrative [capitalization his] without my help.”

Efforts to reach Hiscock were unsuccessful, but Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By The T-Rex is the author’s second Kindle Single. (There was a third on his Amazon author page, BONED, but it’s since disappeared.) Though the title is shamelessly Tingley, the book itself aims for freshness, starting with a first sentence that recalls Lewis Carroll’s instinct for finding that just-right moment before language collapses: “I tried not to think too hard,” the narrator says, “about how it was I got to where I found myself.”

You can almost imagine Alice wondering the exact same thing when, dizzy from interdimensional travel, she lands in Wonderland—except Alice does not, so far as we know, have green skin and shoot hot laser light from her three breasts. Nor does she fall for a 65-million-year-old bearded T. rex named Tyrone. That’s all the journey of Hiscock’s protagonist, Kelly Kiwaxyahilajhonnosoupolus, a native of the planet (sigh) Fylashio, where Kelly hopes her tentacled lover Charlie awaits her return.

Instead, what ensues is a lot of dino-Fylashio action. Hiscock swaps the Carrollian triumphs for unforgivable words like “boobage” and a reliance on subconsciously motivated phrases like “at this point,” and his similes—a tongue that twists around a head “like a rolled up piece of bologna”—begin to sicken. Nobody’s suggesting that Chuck Tingle would’ve turned in a sensitive monster porn about overcoming body incompatibilities, but at least his themes are relentlessly urgent, from Redacted In The Butt By Redacted Under The Tromp Administration to Butt Butt Land: Ryan Goslins And The City Of Butts. Hiscock is no Tingle—he’s a tool.

Unless, of course, Tingle and Hiscock are one and the same.

In hopes of clearing this up, I reached out to Tingle to congratulate him on his latest Hugo nom and ask what he made of Stix Hiscock. His response is reproduced in full:

hello buckaroo name of JASON thank you for writing and thank you for congrats on this way! i believe this author is put on the nominees by THE BAD DOGS BLUES as a way to prank the hugos like when they thought author name of chuck was some goof they could push around (no way buddy not this buckaroo). so it seems to be same idea as last year dont know much about it. thing is you cant just nominate some reverse twin of chuck there is only one chuck on this timeline and he is nominated as BEST FAN WRITER all by his own! this is a good way i am so proud! so long story short i hope this new author is not a reverse twin of the void but who knows i have not seen the end of this timeline branch yet.

If you’re unfamiliar with Tingle’s writing style from his Twitter feed or multiple Reddit AMAs, don’t worry: this is how he writes. As for his answer, it’s inconclusive. Personally, I’d like to believe Tingle is Twingle, because that would mean the Puppies lose once and for all, but if Hiscock is just a rando Tingle copycat who’s now being exploited to delegitimize the terrific work of underrepresented writers in an already marginalized literary subgenre, it’s on him to stick up for himself. To turn a bit of notoriety, Tingle-style, into some amount of good. So if you’re real, Stix, ditch the boobage—and grow some stones.